Four Equals One China—Communist China (Part 1 of 7)

May 15, 2010

The four Chinas are Communist China, Urban China, Rural China and Minority China. The Communist Party has more than 70 million members. Then there are the members of the Communist Youth League (another 70+ million), whom are not members of the Communist Party.

The members of these two groups are the ruling class. They have the best health care and probably make up a sizable portion of China’s middle class, which has been estimated at 200 to 400 million people living primarily in urban areas.

President Hu Jintao

Hu Jintao, was elected president of the PRC on March 15, 2003. According to the Chinese Constitution, he may only serve two five-year terms and has to stand for reelection after the first term. There is an article of impeachment in the Chinese constitution that was added after Mao.

Go to Four Equals One China: Part 2

Many in the west consider the president of China a dictator. By definition, that is wrong. See Dictatorship Defined

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, government | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Giving up Power is Painful

May 13, 2010

Something I read this morning revealed a similarity about America and China’s governments. Break Up the Parties was in the May 2010, AARP Bulletin about ending the partisan poison that has almost caused a political cardiac arrest in Washington and Sacramento. In Washington, the suggestion was to stop seating Democrats on one side of the aisle and Republicans on the other and seat them alphabetically so they talk to each other. 

In California, Two Government Reform Measures on June 8 Ballot would end the status quo.  Instead of Registered Republican voters only voting for Republican candidates and Democrats for Democratic politicians, this measure, if passed, would open the ballot so all voters could vote for any candidate from any political party.

Gasp! California’s Proposition 14 brought Democrats and Republicans together to defeat it.

Why? For the same reason why most of the 70 million members of China’s Communist Party don’t want to hold open elections and allow all Chinese citizens to vote for multiple parties, which is restricted in both America and China since it isn’t the voters who decide the next President of the United States. The Electoral College does that. 

In case you don’t know, it was 535 handpicked, loyal registered Republicans and Democrats that elected President G. W. Bush to his first term in the White House while the popular vote went to Vice President Al Gore by more than a million. At least in China, the Communist Party has more than 70 million who take part in deciding who the eventual Presidential contenders will be.

Discover an example of how Power Corrupts
____________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

2 Comments | America, China, government, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

America Electrified — China’s Road Map (Part 1 of 2)

May 9, 2010

In 1952, China was producing 0.005 kilowatts of electricity. Now they need trillions of kilowatts. After Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, China seriously started building electrical power plants.

If you study the timeline for the growth of America’s electrical grid, you will discover that Thomas Edison designed and built the first direct current (DC) power plant in 1882. Then the first alternating current (AC) power plant opened in 1885 and transmitted power 200 miles from the plant.

By 1927, forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until 1933 that Congress passed legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which now produces 125 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

Similar to China today, in the 1930s there was a huge gap between people in America’s towns and people on farms. About 10 percent of U.S. farm families had central station electricity in the mid-30s. Like China, almost all urban people had power. Source: Living History Farm

Go to Part 2 of America Electrified or discover Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | America, business, China, Chinese history, government | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Getting Around China’s Net Nanny

May 6, 2010

Eric at Amplify.com has a right to his opinion, but that opinion was wrong. Amplify.com says “Google’s Decision Re: China Fails to Knock Giant Off Its Perch.” and applauds Google’s decision to take a stand on China.

This post from Amplify was off the mark.  Google was making a profit everywhere but China.  Baidu, China’s Google, with more than sixty percent of the market share, was cleaning Google’s clock, because Google didn’t know how to serve the people properly. Google wasn’t alone. E-bay and PayPal made similar mistakes and lost money in China too.

There is no mention that Microsoft’s Bing may be quietly slipping into China to replace Google figuring that 30% of more than three hundred million people are worth the risk. Meanwhile, Google moves to Hong Kong with tail between legs. Oh well, Google can’t win all the time.

Besides, what is this big deal about censorship in China? Anyone who lives in China and surfs the net knows how to get around the Chinese Net Nanny by using proxy servers. I have friends in China who do it daily.

See more at Google Recycled.

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

1 Comment | business, China, government, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Getting the Job Done

May 4, 2010

How can America stay competitive in the global marketplace when the infrastructure in America is wearing out, and it’s time consuming and frustrating to get anything done?

John Hockenberry–a former ABC and NBC reporter and now the host for a New York public-radio morning talk show–had the answer. He said on his show that he was yearning for a Chinese dictatorship in America to get things done.

John Hockenberry

What Hockenberry said was true. The Chinese do get things done. He was wrong about one thing. China is not a dictatorship.

A few years into the 21st century, we were in China sleeping on the blanket-covered floor of my father-in-law’s flat in the old French sector of Shanghai. His three rooms were on the second floor of a three-story building that once belonged to a French family prior to World War II. Now seven families lived in that building. What had been a walk-in-closet had been converted into a kitchen/bathroom. The balcony had been closed in—that’s where we were sleeping.

High block walls surrounded the houses in the French sector. When we woke up and left the flat to visit the local farmer’s market, the walls were gone as if they’d never been. 

Later, we learned that the Shanghai city government decided to open the city and the best way to do that was to remove the walls. An army of workers came in the night and removed the walls without waking us up.

That’s what John Hockenberry was talking about. The ability of China’s government to move fast.

Follow this link to learn more about high-speed rail in China.

1 Comment | America, business, China, Chinese Culture, government | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »